The Great Stork Race

Making provision for minor children in a Will is usually a commendable idea, but a wealthy Canadian took this to the extreme.

Lawyer and financier Charles Vance Millar had a reputation reputation as a practical joker, and so it was with his Will when he died in 1926.Millar bequeathed the lifetime occupation of his Jamaican holiday day home, jointly to three men he knew hated one another; he left a fortune of shares in a brewery to seven Protestant ministers known for their ardent anti-drinking stance, provided they participated in its management.

 A childless bachelor, Millar’s most outrageous testamentary prank was to leave the sizable balance of his entire estate to whichever Canadian woman happened to have the greatest number of (legitimate) babies in the ten years following his death.

This resulted in a frenzied breeding contest which became known as the “Great Stork Race”. Millar’s Will survived a decade of legal challenges by distant family members, and ten years later four woman, each having produced nine offspring in that time, shared a $750,000 fortune between them (about R66 million in to-day’s terms).